(Lincoln’s Inn, 1st Sunday in Lent, March 5, 1854.)
‘And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt-offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’—Genesis viii. 20-22.
After the story of Cain and Abel, there is no further allusion to sacrifice in the records of the world before the flood. But the meaning of these two sacrifices goes through the history. The confession of dependence and trust on a righteous Being, from whom life came, which made Abel’s offering an acceptable one; the proud feeling of Cain, that he had something to give, which led to discontent when he received nothing in return for his gift—which led to murder when he had someone upon whom he could put forth his power,— these are the characteristics of the period, because that period exhibits the characteristics of human beings in the simplest and earliest stage of their development. The faith of the patriarchs who called on the name of the Lord,—who walked with God,—who begat sons and daughters, and died,—who looked for someone to comfort them concerning the work and toil of their hands because of the ground which the Lord had cursed, was merely an expansion of that faith which had been the blessing of Abel and the cause of his death. The violence and corruption with which the earth is said to have been filled, were merely the natural outcomings of that unbelief in right, that confidence in might, of which Cain had been the first example. Do not let us say, as some have said, that Abel was a religious man, and Cain an irreligious man; that is not the Bible language, either concerning them or their successors. The acts of Cain are just as religious as those of his brother; one brought a sacrifice just as well as the other. We have no reason to suppose, that there may not have been abundance of religion among those upon whom the flood came. The old words are the true words. Abel was a righteous man; his sacrifice was offered to a righteous Being: it expressed faith in such a Being. Cain was unrighteous; he believed in power, and nothing else. His sacrifice was presented to a power, and was designed to win its favour. It was not presented to God; it was no worship of Him; it could not be acknowledged by Him. It was the same afterwards. Noah, we are told, was a just man and perfect in his generations, and he walked with God. This language is in strict harmony with all that we read afterwards in the Old Testament Scriptures; it is carried out and interpreted in the New. Noah reverenced right and justice; he ordered his family well; he lived in the presence of an unseen Being who is right and true, and who had appointed him to be the head of a family. These are the best modern equivalents we can find for the older and nobler phraseology. They make the rest of his life intelligible to us. Such a man, seeing violence, tyranny, ill-doing, brutality all around him, knew assuredly that this was not meant to be; that God had not made the world for this. He was sure it could not last; no matter how many were taking part in the evil, and were sanctioning it in their neighbours; no matter whether the race of Seth was defiled with it as well as the race of Cain; no matter whether the whole scheme of men’s lives, aye, and the scheme of their religion, was framed on the notion that wrong was tolerable or inevitable, and that the powers above might be bribed to overlook it. Such a state of things had a curse upon it; God’s own curse. He knew it; for he walked with God. A Teacher, whom he could not see with his eyes, but who was with him, opened his heart to know that every injustice and every lie is contrary to his nature,—contrary to the order He has established; that He is actually fighting against injustice and lies in His universe, and in every being upon it; that He will prevail. This Noah learnt, not by any sagacity of his, not because he was in different circumstances from the men about him, or had a finer temperament than theirs; but because he confessed the Voice of God who was speaking to him, warning him, judging him; because he feared to disobey that Voice. It was the God of his fathers, who made him understand this,—the God to whom they had listened, and whom they had worshipped. He had not ceased to be; He would not cease to be. With that knowledge of the past and present comes also knowledge of the future. One is as hard for man to read as the other. God interprets each to him by the other. Noah was verily certain that there was an end designed for the wickedness of men. When it would come he might not know; but it would come;—the day and the hour were determined though they might not concern him. Such faith, once cherished, is fed day by day; it grows stronger through the very sight of the evils which are so appalling; it becomes deeper as they become deeper; it becomes also more distinct and definite. The man who holds it, acts upon it; he goes on in a plain, simple course, dwells with his family, begets sons and daughters. By the orderliness and quietness of his life, he becomes a witness against the turbulent, self-willed world, in the midst of which he is dwelling. By degrees he receives light respecting the nature of the punishment which will overtake that world. He is taught by God how to act as a provident man should act when a danger is impending: how to warn his neighbours of it, that they may escape it too. There is called forth in him, through his faith, the foresight and wisdom, which are every day departing from the heartless, anxious self-seekers, who are in continual dread of danger, and are continually hunting after safety and comfort. But there is called forth in him also, by this same faith, an earnest interest in his fellow-men. He separates from them, only that he may be a witness to them of the good which they are flying from, and which he claims for himself and his family, because he believes that God designs it for the creatures He has formed.
If we give any different explanation from this of the act of Noah in preparing the ark, we contradict the words of the New Testament as well as the Old; we take the sense and moral out of the story; we make it immoral and selfish. And by doing so, we make the sacrifice which Noah offered when the flood had subsided, and he came forth into the restored world, a Cain sacrifice; we do not find in the narrative of it what is assuredly there—a beautiful and consistent exposition of the reason why the Lord had respect to Abel’s offering, and not to his brother’s.
There is an evident difference between this history and the one of which I spoke last Sunday. There were no particulars given us respecting the form and method of Abel’s or Cain’s sacrifice. It was merely said, that one brought of the firstlings of his flock, the other of the fruits of the ground. Now we are told of an altar which Noah builded, of his choosing out clean beasts and clean fowls, of his offering a burnt-offering on the altar. You may have observed how accurately the form of the ark is described in the previous chapter, and how all the arrangements of it are referred to the divine Teacher. It is assumed that a stage has come in the life of the world, when the working in wood and iron is no longer the fruit of men’s eagerness to put forth powers which they are not fit to exercise; that these powers can now be used and cultivated for the worthiest ends under the highest guidance. Here, under the same inward guidance, the mound of turf gives place to the altar which is built; an order is discovered in the dignity of the inferior creatures; the worthiest are selected for an oblation to God; the fire which consumes, the flame which ascends, are used to express the intention of him who presents the victim. If you asked him to tell you what these visible things signified to him, he could have given you no answer. At a later time men might have muttered one which would have a certain sense, but not a very clear sense; now they would simply act on their intuition, and let it justify itself as it could. Noah would be sure that it had not come from himself; that God had awakened it in him; if He had something different to teach other men elsewhere, so let it be. All he had to do, was to follow where a light, which had not deceived him hitherto, was pointing the way.
And, I think, we must all feel that there was an inward progress in the heart of the man, corresponding to this progress in his method of uttering his submission and his aspirations. There was a certain solitude in the condition of the patriarchs of the old world—not an absolute solitude, for that can never be where there are husbands and wives, fathers and children, where they look upon the graves of those who have gone before them, and upon the faces which are beginning to express wonder and hope—but still the solitude of men who feel that they have little to do with the greatest portion of the earth, inhabited or uninhabited; who think of what lies beyond their own homes only as full of crime.
But the man who came out of the ark, and builded an altar to the Lord, must have felt that he was representing all human beings; that he was not speaking what was in himself so much as offering the homage of the restored universe. He had prepared an ark for the saving of his house; but that ark had been for the saving of the race which God had made in His own image, of all the races which He had made subject to that. The simple mind of a patriarch could not take in so vast a thought as this; what need that he should take it in? It was true; if he could not comprehend it, he yet could speak out the marvel and the awe of his heart to Him who knew all.
What was Noah’s sacrifice but this? As childlike as that of the man who first gazed on the strange world, and could not interpret it; who first saw death, and wanted to be told what it signified; who first felt sin, and would fly from it. As childlike as his; perhaps more childlike, because the oppression of ages and of the sin which had been done in them, of the deaths which had been died in them, was greater than that which the other could experience—and therefore the need of casting it on someone who could bear it was greater; and because the sense of deliverance and redemption and restoration—the assurance that the righteous God was a deliverer, redeemer, restorer—must have been such as none could have had who had not seen how all the powers of the world were used for the punishment of those who had braved Him instead of believing in Him; and how, nevertheless, the order stood fast, and came forth fresher and fairer out of the ruin. In what words was it possible to express a sense of man’s greatness the king over the mightiest animals—and of man’s littleness in the presence of the elements which had been let loose upon him; of the intimate, inseparable union between man and man; of the bitter strifes which tore them asunder; of the awful nearness of men to their Maker; of their estrangement from Him? How could he and his sons say: ’ We confess that Thou hast made us rulers; help us to govern; we know that the world can crush us; help us not to fear it, but Thee. We are sure that we have rebelled against Thee; we bless Thee that Thou upholdest us and unitest us to Thee?’ The altar, the clean beasts, the fire, and the man presenting the animals to Him whom he cannot see, in the fire—as one of the mightiest ministers of His will, these were the signs which supplied the want of language, or translated the language of earth into that of Heaven.
If that translation is possible, the converse is possible also. The next clause of our text is an example of the way in which the mysteries of Heaven may be presented in the forms of earth: ’ And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done.’ ‘How gross,’ exclaims the critic of our day, ’ this phraseology is! Smelled a sweet savour! How can we ‘tolerate such modes of speaking when they are applied to the Divine Majesty?’ Have you ever thought what other modes of speech you would use as a substitute for these? Have you ever considered whether abstract modes of speech would convey the same truth, half so effectually, half so reverently, as those which are drawn from the wonderful senses with which God has endowed us? If these senses seem to you vulgar, not full of meaning and mystery, it is a pity; there is much in what is nearest you which you have not reflected on; you had better dwell for awhile on the acts with which you are most familiar, before you travel round earth and to the stars. If expressions that have no sensible correspondents please you better, at least try to give yourselves some account of them; if they are more intellectual, be sure that you understand them; if you can ascend on these wings more rapidly into the empyrean, be sure that you do ascend, and that you bring some authentic and credible reports of what you find there. Take care that you do not come back with the blank and melancholy tidings—the most dismal which human beings can hear—that there is an abstraction there, and not a Father; a negation of all that we possess and admire below, not one in whom is the fullness of light and glory, of which all things here serve as faint hints and likenesses. Perhaps, after some experience of what a phantom you have created for yourselves, by merely emptying Him whom you profess to adore of all that connects Him with human beings, you may begin better to appreciate the book which teaches us to see everywhere in the world of sense the tokens of that connexion; which shows us everywhere some steps of the ladder which is set upon the ground we tread, and which reaches to the throne of God. The smelling the sweet savour of a sacrifice imports, I think, more vividly, more truly, than almost any image could, the complacency and satisfaction of the God who had desired men to obey Him, to confide in Him, to seek Him, with acts which testified their submission, their trust, their craving for more perfect communion. And the words which follow as clearly intimate the progressive, and yet the permanent, character of the divine education and government. The flood was necessary in one period of man’s discipline and growth; it would not need to be repeated in another. It had not taken, and could not take away sin; that was not its object the imaginations of man’s heart remained evil continually, as they were before. But it had declared the unchangeableness of God’s righteous order; that that would bend to no transgression; that that would overcome all who set up mere power and disorder against it. And now the same order would assert itself by the regular succession of seed-time and harvest, of day and night, of summer and winter. Apparent breaches in the regular course of events, surprising visitations, prove at times what the evenness and persistency of nature proves habitually—that the just God, of whom man is the image, against whose laws he is so continually striving, is the Author and Ruler of all things.
The foundation of sacrifice, as we find it set forth in these early records of the Bible, is laid in this fixed will of God; in His fixed purpose to assert righteousness; in the wisdom which adapts its means to the condition of the creature for whose sake they are used; in the graciousness which seeks by all these means to bring Man out of a wrong state, to establish him in his true state. The sacrifice assumes eternal right to be in the Ruler of the universe, all the caprice to have come from man, from his struggle to be an independent being, from his habit of distrust. When the sense of dependence is restored to man by the discovery of his own impotence—when trust is restored by the discovery that the God of all seeks his good—he comes to make surrender, he brings the sacrifice which is the expression of his surrender. If he is maintaining a struggle with his own tendency to self-will and disobedience, if he is striving to submit, then the sacrifice is the regular expression of the purpose of his life; he is learning every day that the imagination of the thoughts of his heart is evil continually; therefore, he has more necessity every day of escaping from himself—of escaping to God. And in doing so, he is confessing the government of God over the world, of which he is but one inhabitant; the ordinance of seed-time and harvest, summer and winter, day and night, in which every man around him is as much concerned as he is. He is confessing the government of God over himself, because he is a man formed in His image; capable of being right only so far as He reflects that image; capable of doing right only so far as he is the instrument of fulfilling God’s will. And that also is equally true of all about him. He desires to be delivered from the darkness which hinders him from entering into God’s light that is shining so clearly and gloriously, if there were eyes to behold it, upon his whole race. I wish you to see how everlasting and universal that principle is, which we have discovered in the act of Noah, when he came forth from the ark and saw that the world which had been covered with waters was the same goodly world still; when he felt that he and his wife and his sons and his daughters had been more the objects of the care and watchfulness of God than any of the things which He had created, though all these had been dear to Him; when he received the sure witness that the same God would be with his sons and his sons’ sons to whatever part of the earth they might travel—that He would never forget the works of His own hands.
And have we not an equal right to say that the principle, which is expressed in the words that declares the complacency of God in the burnt-offering which Noah offered upon the altar, is everlasting and universal? Have we the least ground for thinking that He accepts coldly and distantly the homage of men’s hearts, and acts, and words; that He is not well pleased with it? Is not the joy with which any parent receives the free habitual service of a child striving to be dutiful, and the submission of one who has been undutiful, the faint image of the joy with which the Father of lights receives him who wishes to dwell at home, as well as the prodigal who has just recollected that he has a home to which he may return? If, indeed, the thought intrudes itself into the elder brother’s heart; ‘I have earned a right to my father’s favour by my daily offerings; who is he that comes from dwelling with harlots to eat the fatted calf?’—if the thought intrudes itself into the younger brother’s heart; ‘By some sacrifices of mine I may purchase again that which I had lost—I may persuade my father to overlook my wanderings and to free me from the punishments which they deserve at his hands,’— the sacrifice of each becomes a Cain sacrifice; there is no submission in it, no trust in it; there can be no sweetness in the savour of it, for there is that in it which is not of God, which has no fellowship with God, which is hateful to God—pride, malice, envy. These habits haunt every man; none can say, I am free from them. But if he comes to offer sacrifice to God, he comes to confess and seek deliverance from them as from the greatest and most direful curses that can rest upon him in this world or in the world to come.
These principles, seeing that they are involved in the relation of man to God—in his eternal order—were the same in Noah’s days as in ours, the same in Abel’s as in Noah’s. But we have learnt something from Noah’s sacrifice which we could not learn from Abel’s; something more of the social nature of these offerings; something more of their meaning, as following after long centuries of evil, and after a wonderful redemption; something more of the intercourse and sympathy which exist between him who sacrifices and Him to whom the sacrifice is made. Noah, we felt, was representing the race in his sacrifice; he was confessing the evil in him, and in his fellows, which had brought ruin upon the world, and was confessing the wisdom which had preserved it. These are great steps onward in the history.
But, after all, are we not conscious that they are mere hints of truths which must be unfolded, as they could not be in Abel’s sacrifice or in Noah’s? The representative of humanity after the flood lived his nine hundred years, and died. Has humanity no continual representative? The imagination of men’s thoughts remained evil continually after the fire had ascended from the altar. Is there no offering which has power to reach the heart and to purge it? That sweet sacrifice was presented, the flame went out, the incense evaporated, and foul pestilent vapours rose from the earth and grew thicker with each generation. Is there no altar from which the flame is ever ascending, no sweet savour, of which God may say always: ‘With this I am well pleased. For the sake of this I will dwell with men and walk with them, and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: and their sins and iniquities I will remember no more’?